DDoS attacks increase more than 500 percent over last year

The second quarter of 2020 has seen a massive 570 percent increase in 'bit-and-piece' DDoS attacks compared to the same period last year, according to the latest threat report from Nexusguard.

Bit-and-piece attacks target ASN-level communication service provider (CSP) networks by dispersing small pieces of junk traffic across a diverse pool of IP addresses across hundreds of IP prefixes.

ASNs (Autonomous System Numbers) are routable IP prefixes belonging to a particular organization, targeting them in this way causes significant challenges for CSPs and for typical threshold-based detection, which is unreliable for pinpointing the specific attacks to apply the correct mitigation.

Nexusguard analysts witnessed attacks using small sizes -- more than 51 percent of bit-and-piece attacks were smaller than 30Mbps -- to force CSPs to subject entire networks of traffic to risk mitigation.

"Increases in remote work and study mean that uninterrupted online service is more critical than ever," says Juniman Kasman, chief technology officer for Nexusguard. "Cyber attackers have rewritten their battlefield playbooks and craftily optimized their resources so that they can sustain longer, more persistent attacks. Companies must look to deep learning in their approaches if they hope to match the sophistication and complexity needed to effectively stop these advanced threats."

Where in the past in the past, attackers have used bit-and-piece attacks with a single attack vector to launch new attacks based on that vector, Nexusguard reports a new tendency to employ a blend of offensive measures in order to launch a wider range of attacks. This is intended to increase the level of difficulty involved for CSPs to detect and differentiate between malicious and legitimate traffic.

You can get the full Q2 2020 Threat Report on the Nexusguard blog.

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